c360 Deserves Honorable Mention

With numerous Microsoft CRM projects starting and finishing at the same time, it's been incredibly busy at Navint.

In an ongoing effort to serve our Microsoft CRM clients by delivering the best possible solution, a particular independent software vendor (ISV) who is focused solely on Microsoft CRM deserves honorable mention.

If you've not heard of c360 or seen their Microsoft CRM solution enhancements, then I strongly encourge you to go check them out.

A few c360's solutions that have saved us a lot of time (and have proven to be THE ANSWER for a number of our Microsoft CRM clients) include:

Word Mail Merge. Navint is in the process of implementing this solution for one of our clients who has complex and ever changing quoting and invoicing requirements. Certainly less skills intensive than SRS, c360's Word Mail Merge solution provides a simple and flexible reporting interface that allows Microsoft CRM users to print quotes and invoices (or data from any other Microsoft CRM entity) in company acceptable formats based on precreated Microsoft Word Templates.

Multi Field Search. Given the ability to create custom entities in Microsoft CRM 3.0, it is obviously important that users are able to search across those entities. As many Microsoft CRM users have come to find out - usually after building their custom entities - the current Advanced Find functionality in Microsoft CRM is limited to searching across existing entities. In other words, if the characteristics of an Advanced Find search require multiple fields from both an existing entity (e.g., Account) and a custom entity, then you are stuck. However, c360's Multi Field Search tool takes care of this problem. Yes, Navint has a couple of Microsoft CRM clients that are very happy that this tool exists!

Record Clone Utility. For whatever reason Microsoft CRM does not yet have a native record cloning tool. That means if Microsoft CRM users want to create a new record (e.g., a Contact) that has most of the same address information as an existing Contact they have to rekey all that data into the new Contact record. But not if they have c360's Record Cloning Tool installed. And what's cool is that with this tool you can clone any Microsoft CRM record type. Better yet, it's FREE!

And although I haven't tested it yet, c360 recently released a solution called Import Manager which allows Microsoft CRM users to import Lead, Account, Contact data as well as any other data that they have built custom entities for. Furthermore, Import Manager includes functionality that maintains existing relationships between entities - this is key considering the limitations of Microsoft CRM's native Bulk Import Tool.

Some of you may say, what about Microsoft CRM's data migration framework? Or, what about Scribe? Certainly those tools work too. c360's Import Manager is a nice addition though.